Data Updates and Other Changes

The latest set of updates includes  4 species with characteristics added, approximately 80 species with new data on stomatal counts,  and approximately 1000  plants  with pollen diameters added. We have also been working on  the ordering of the specific  name for hybrids: we now place the hybrid name first, and  the parental names following.  We plan to combine these with a hybrid table from the original database  which will link directly to the parental names and characteristics.

We will be planning an updated user interface over the winter, and if anyone has concrete proposals or suggestions, please email Henry Ford or manager@ecoflora.co.uk

Thanks to those who have already contributed.

Relative Growth rates and Biological Floras

Relative Growth Rates: 

Two new characteristics have been added for 129 plants, RGRmax, and RGR which will be made searchable  in the new year.


Biological Flora Accounts:

With the recent addition of access to CABI fact sheets and the Database of Insects and their food plants, it made  great sense to add links to the autecological accounts of species in the Biological Flora of the British Isles series published in the Journal of Ecology. The access to these varies, either from Wiley or from JSTOR, and  may depend on your personal permissions.  The extant accounts have been linked to the species pages and  you can now go to these directly.

Drought, Waterlogging and Shade tolerance, and access to the BRC Database of Insect and their Food Plants

New data 
New data from Niinemets and Valadares, 2006, on drought, waterlogging and shade tolerance  for some 500 woody shrubs and trees has been added. These indices  come with a new help page ( from the help menu) and at the moment are not searchable but appear as new characteristics in the ecological characteristics list for each species.

Searchable Characteristics
It has not gone unnoticed that several new characteristics have been added to the characteristics list over past couple of  years,  but we have not programmed the interface to include relevant search facilities.  This will be remedied over this winter  as we hope to revamp the user interface in general. Until then the data will appear under the lists of characteristics for particular species.

BRC Database of Insect and their Food Plants
We now have direct access to this database from the menu for each species if the BRC hold data, which they do  for over 1600 plants in our database. This means that as well as the NHM corrected data that we hold (increasingly historic data)  a maintained list of  insects that use each species is  now available directly from the site.

Summer News

Data Corrections

 Over the spring and summer two major tasks have been undertaken by  Clive Massey:  the diacriticals   have been  corrected in the database, and the species names have been returned to an initial capital letter. Both tasks are much simpler in their description than their completion.

During the course of this work we found satisfyingly few data errors of the type that we can identify  ( e.g. misplaced elements etc. ), as opposed to  incorrect entries of data which can only be identified by checking.

Photographs.

We now have over 500 species with photographs, and many of these have had their  photographs improved. Anyone who has photographs that they would like to put on the database, please contact me.

New Species.

8 species have had their data added to the database, and 13 have had additional data entered.  Autumn should see a return to the data additions and updates. 

Future Developments.

 Later on this year we will undertake a major redevelopment of the user interface, allowing more efficient mining of the   database, and access to other databases of a similar nature from species searches.  Again if there are specific features that anyone would like to see incorporated, do let us know.

Funding and Team Members

Funding

Sad to say the BES  have decided not to fund us again, so for the third year running we will be without funds. Anyone with innovative ideas, drop us a line. Work will carry on on an entirely voluntary basis.

Team Members

I have been joined by Clive Massey, a database expert, ex  Bath University, and he has already been through the database behind the scenes and tidied up any number of  small problems, including accents on author names.  It is good to have someone  to bounce ideas off.

Progress.

Apart from the background database work, 15 species  have had photographs added, and 23 have had additional photographs. 27 species have had  descriptions added and ecological characteristics added. The Somerset Rare Plants Group have  contributed photos and I look foward to more of them being uploaded.

Plans.

We hope to add direct links to the  BRC  insect database and to the UK moth database. This should  decrease the potential workload for us in maintaining the insect database when there are experts beavering away maintaining these properly. Our data will remain online, but  further and more detailed data will be available from these  sources. We will enhanced our data with extracts from the TRY database system to which we are contributors. 

Our next target is to redesign the  main interface, allowing for easier search facilities

Data additions and corrections during January

We have been busy  during this month and have made a number of corrections to typographical errors in the data.  Our main work  has been the addition of 750  records spread across the data set, mainly to seed weight and seed numbers, but also to two new characteristics, mean plant dry mass and max stem diameter.  These are all accompanied as usual by their sources, of which we have added a further 50.

We should soon have a reasonably complete table of hybrids  and links to their distributions etc, but  little ecological data.  The next task will then be  the writing and uploading of the descriptions for the next 300 aliens, and the extraction of the data for these plants. This will  provide us with data on a total of over 1000 of our most common aliens.


Henry F

Happy New Year to our users

Ecoflora hopes everyone has had a great holiday season, that everyone has had a productive year last year,  and that the plans for your activities in 2015 are  getting under way.

Here, we are about to start a rationalisation of the database, prior to redesigning the interface. Now is the time to put in your requests from your wishlist.   We are planning the usual updates of species data, and hope to have more photographs ready for the production of a plant identification app. The addition of 26,000 records of floral morphology last year should enable us to complete this by spring this year.  We also intend to apply to TRY for further data on our species. The TRY data sets do not necessarily correspond to our ecological characteristics, but that is no reason not to include the data, even thought they may  not prove to be sensibly  searchable as the traits will differ from species to species.  

Our usage statistics are slightly down from last year, but since being a member of TRY - www.try-db.org, we have been receiving regular data requests via this site at a rate of about 20 per month. One has popped up as I type this note.

We also hope to receive funding for our work this year and will be putting in a few grant applications to this end.

So we hope that all our users have a splendid New Year.

Henry Ford

Ecoflora